September 19, 2011

Letter to Campus from the President and Provost: K-State 2025

In February 2010, the university launched an ambitious planning initiative with the visionary goal to be recognized as a top 50 public research university by 2025. Building on our history as a public land-grant institution, we embarked together on a planning process that is inclusive and exciting.

With broad involvement from faculty, staff, students, and alumni, K-Staters worked together to craft our future. Hundreds of people contributed to the plan. Moving forward, continued dialogue will be essential.

Today, we are very pleased to announce K-State 2025: A Visionary Plan for Kansas State University is now available on the K-State 2025 website.

This university strategic plan will serve as a guide for our decision-making and priority setting, identifying what we want to emphasize as we continue to build our national reputation.

For the past several weeks, we have had the pleasure of talking with many of you in one of our 15 K-State 2025 roll-out meetings with colleges, departments, and other units. We were reminded once again of how extraordinary and multi-faceted we are as a university community. We were energized by your questions, suggestions, and passion for K-State and its future.

Achieving our goals will not be easy – many of the initiatives will take several years to accomplish and may raise additional strategic questions and challenges along the way. Moving forward requires shared commitment as well as new ideas, new plans, new resources, and new ways of doing things.

Measuring our success and recognizing our accomplishments will be important. We will report our progress annually, reviewing the plan each year to consider unanticipated challenges or opportunities and adjust accordingly. Every fifth year, we will revise the full plan to reflect our progress on our short, mid-, and long-term outcomes.

Everyone at K-State has a role to play in moving K-State toward our goal of becoming a top 50 public research university. Our 2025 plan is only as good as we are in working with it. Each college, department and unit will create a plan specific for their area. We will revisit the plan to see if revisions need to be made. This is a working document -- a tool to help us get where we want to be.

We want to thank the many members of our K-State family for the time, enthusiasm, honesty, and passion you have shown throughout this effort. Because of you, we are well on our way to advancing the 2025 vision.

We invite your continued participation to help bring this vision to life.